Raid Leading 4: A Focus Lost

Our raid leader needed to take another leave of absence, and so once again I was given the reigns.  We were going back into Hyjal.  One of the officers decided to step out in place of another healer, leaving me pretty much by myself to lead the raid.  Now was my chance to really establish myself as a respected raid leader, to instill trust and confidence in my fellow raiders, to forge ahead in our progression on Archimonde.

…or it was a chance to establish myself as the “cool” raid leader .  (Hint: that’s the route I chose)  Our usual rule about swearing in vent was levied.  The atmosphere of the raid was light and we had a great time.  That is…until we wiped on Azgalor.  Chalk it up to our MT being out of LoS for the misdirect pull and start over.  One of our tanks had to go, so I switched to my warrior for my first attempts at tanking the trash.  After hearing such horrid recollections of it from other tanks, I was a little worried as to how I would do.  But anyways, I needed to get the raid refocused and ready to kill Azgalor.

1 problem.  This is pretty hard to do when I don’t even have time to talk as I frantically try to tank the overlapping myriad of monsters on my screen.  The focus of the raid was lost well before we even started pulling Rage Winterchill trash.  Trying to win it back would prove to be impossible.  Last wave before Azgalor and about a half dozen people die.  We scrap our way through the wave, but Azgalor aggro’s before we can rez hardly anyone.  We start the fight with 4 people still dead.  We executed the fight perfectly, but we just ran out of bodies and eventually wiped. 

It was at this point where I realized I pretty much doomed that raid from the start.  Gave the raid some cliché lines about how it was just bad luck, and we’ll get him next time, blah blah.  Yet another lesson learned from failure: Save the fun for AFTER the raid.